CB750F: Day 27: Slow and Steady

Tonight was very “out of the flow” kind of night.

The bottom-half et al, cleanup ended nicely. The mineral spirits made the engine, body, and workspace cleanup very pleasant. It might be hard to see, but even the kickstand and rear footrest mount got cleaned, I had previously believed them to be black! The oil pan is even cleaner. The bike deserved a little TLC. I’m not going to fret about where the brush wouldn’t reach and paint came off. In the future, a pressure-washer and/or full disassembly would be interesting, but, that wasn’t really the goal for this bike; so I was really happy to get it so clean with mineral spirits alone.

Oiled the air filter; just made sure it was evenly coated and all red.

Lubricated the choke and throttle cables. Should have taken a little better notes on cable location. For the choke you can see that you may only click the lubrication clip on one end. The choke was wrapped around from left side to the ride guide-well in the top-most portion of the front fork assembly. The throttle cables, though the photo is almost impossible to make sense of, wraps around from the right side to the left and around and back into the same path as the choke, in the right guide-well. The throttle cables have a clip on the left side just below the gas tank rest, so it is clear where they route.

Since I was in there, I decided to try to replace the right handgrip. Found the old grip glue in there and scraped it off. Pat said it is OK not to glue the throttle side, so I didnt.

Glad Pat mentioned that I should measure the bolt-location of the throttle cable guide mounts in the throttle assembly, I would have never thought to do so. There are a lot of learning-things, for example the throttle assembly won’t close up until you move a little metal dimple into a hole in the bottom of the (stock) handlebar.

Lubricating the cables went well but took a lot more time then I had imagined. The cable lube tool works pretty simply. There is a lot of blowback, at least when I used it, so I had a bunch of paper towels on the ground to capture the lube. I tried small, short spurts ans recommended, but in the end, just blasting away for a while was what it took to get the lube from top to bottom.

TODO: Route the choke cable.

TODO: Route the throttle cables.

TODO: Clean up the cables (full of lube externally)

TODO: Seat the new throttle grip

Project work is never a race and unexpected events are never the end of the world.